Sunday, January 27, 2013

This is from the new Time cover story about Zero Dark Thirty (not online):

Virtually everything about Zero Dark Thirty is debatable, according to [Mark] Boal. "Even simple factual questions are being debated and litigated at the highest levels of government…even among those agencies. I've spoken to two people in the CIA who worked with the same prisoner, who had two totally different views of what got him to talk and of the value of a particular piece of intelligence in the overall puzzle."

Ooops. Jonathan points out that this seems to have violated some very, very, very important government prohibitions about revealing secrets and includes some hard-nosed quotes from both Bush and Obama on this topic. Who are these CIA agents? Why isn't Mark Boal being hauled before tribunals and questioned by the FBI about who is talking to him out of school about such important matters? This would seem to be a dangerous leak of classified information.

Jonathan also notes that this is hardly the first time the government has leaked for its own aggrandizement but it's more than a little ironic considering that they seem to be pursuing particularly ostentatious investigations and prosecutions of whistleblowers these days. He archly concludes with this: